


Everything but the squeal...

by FadedSepia



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Apples, Gen, up-cycling, wrexam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 09:38:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12296454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadedSepia/pseuds/FadedSepia
Summary: A brief look at the day-to-day life of two boys.





	Everything but the squeal...

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Clair (@chronicwhimsy) for beta-reading this!

His light jacket wasn’t enough to block the icy rain, but Quatre shrugged further down into it, grateful for the scarf that at least protected his neck and face. He was almost back to the walk-up he and Duo were currently sharing, anyway. It had, at one point, housed students, back before the Federation had turned the nearby university into a private training academy1. They’d set up a reasonable safe-house in one of the old student rental properties. Duo had been a bit disappointed at not being able to stay off of Brynyffynnon in one of the abandoned shops – “It’s such a fun name, Quat!” – but they’d decided on an apartment block off of Vicarage Hill because it offered more potential exit strategies, easy access to the roof, and at least the premise of legal habitation.

He shrugged out of the sopping coat, hand groping for the hook in the darkened apartment. They weren’t _technically_ squatting, so they could have turned the lights up without too much suspicion from the outside, but keeping the place dimly lit all the time made it more difficult to track their movements behind the closed curtains. Quatre laid his bag down onto the kitchen table, emptying out the contents that he wanted to keep in the refrigerator: beets, cabbage, potatoes, a few dozen eggs, and that awful peanut butter paste Duo insisted putting on perfectly good toast.

The oranges – amazingly on sale, despite embargos and wartime shipping issues that were a constant nuisance now that he was rockside – he could put in the counter bowl with the apples. If he could _find_ the bowl; he could have sworn he’d left it on the counter with the apples he’d picked up the day before. _‘Did I forget to buy apples last time?’_ They could only even _get_ apples once a week, and Duo loved them. Quatre hoped he hadn’t let the other pilot down by neglecting their groceries.

Of course, if the bowl wasn’t here, Duo had likely taken it upstairs. Across their shared missions, Quatre had learned that the other boy rarely ate full meals by himself, snacking in fits and starts when there was no one around. The L4 pilot had been out since midmorning pretending to laze around the cafes and shops, observing the traffic patterns during shift changes at the training centre. _‘He probably got a little bit lonely. Maybe **I** can cook tonight.’_

Hanging up his scarf over the radiator– the wool smelled terrible now that it was wet! – and slipping out of his somewhat squelchy loafers, the smaller pilot headed back to their shared bedroom. Quatre opened the door, looking for his fellow pilot. The braided boy was perched on a dresser, back flush against the corner by their window. The bowl, empty now, was on the bureau beside him. Quatre had opened the door just in time to see the other boy shove what looked like almost half of an apple into his mouth all at once, as if he was some kind of sweatshirt clad squirrel. “Duo?”

The L2 pilot jumped and choked, a chunk of apple slipping partway from his mouth before he pushed it back in, covering his chewing with his hand.

“Duo, slow down!” Quatre had dropped tote holding the oranges onto the floor, rushing to his friend’s side and patting him on the back. One of the apples thudded onto the floor, having rolled from Duo’s lap. “No one is going to take it away from you.”

“Sorry, habit.” Muffled around a mouthful of apple, the words were barely intelligible, if clearly embarrassed. Duo wiped the back of his sleeve across his mouth, still chewing away at the apple.

On reflection, Quatre was fairly certain that was part of why intelligible dinner conversation all but subsided when Wufei or Heero weren’t around. Trowa and Duo, both food insecure since childhood, were never exactly good conversation when they were eating. The L3 pilot ate as if every meal was a mission; hunched down over his plate, elbows out to jab anyone who got too close. Duo, by contrast, would converse throughout the meal, but it would be around whatever he was currently gulping down. It often resulted in the other young man (almost) gagging on something.

The braided pilot slipped down from his perch, one apple still in each hand. Added to the one currently rolled under his bed, that left three remaining of a three kilo bag, with no trash in sight, and no bin in their bedroom. Quatre sighed. “Please tell me you didn’t throw the cores out the window.”

“Of course not, that’d be a waste of perfectly good apple.” As he spoke, Duo knelt to reach under the edge of Quatre’s bed, plucking up the now bruised apple and stuffing it, along with one of the others, into his sweatshirt pocket. With his snack safely retrieved and stowed, he toed off his trainers and flopped on his back onto the bed, grinning as the mattress squeaked.

The blonde pilot, meanwhile, had picked up the fruit he’d just bought, leaving the bowl filled with oranges on the dresser as he turned back to Duo. “Alright… So, where are they?”

Lifting up the edge of his hoodie, Duo patted his stomach, grinning, before his hand slid into his pocket, only to return holding up a thin piece stem. “Right here.”

“You mean you… you ate it?”

“Well, yeah. It’s still apple, so it’s edible, right?”

“And the seeds?”

The braided pilot almost had his Shinigami smirk on as he nodded, once more patting his midsection.

“Duo, those seeds are poisonous!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but-” Duo rolled to face him and pinched his fingers together, as if holding something very small,“- they’re teeny-tiny, Quat. After ten years on the streets, and all the shit G shot me up with before we dropped, a little arsenic isn’t gonna be enough to take me out. Besides, Q, I never had the luxury of being picky; a fresh apple core is a hell of a lot tastier than a rotten apple.”

For a boy who was still growing accustomed to eating fruits that weren’t peeled and sliced2, the idea of eating the apple – core, seeds, and all – was almost nauseating. With a quick shake that sent his hair fluttering around his face, Quatre moved over to the foot of his bed, pushing Duo’s legs away for space, and sat down, wholly confused. “But, how?”

“What?”

“How do you eat the… the middle part?”

“Oh, it’s easy.” Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Duo sat up. Taking the other boy’s hand, he pulled the other good apple from his sweatshirt, handing it to Quatre. “It’s all in getting some of the rest in with the core, that way ya don’t notice the taste s’much. You just gotta start from the bottom.”

Duo lifted up his own apple for Quatre to see, holding it so that the stem was in his palm. With a final sideways smile at his temporary roommate, he bit across the bottom of the apple, humming happily as he crunched. It didn’t exactly _look_ appealing, but with the little smile of his face, and a line of juice from the apple dribbling down his chin, Quatre found himself mimicking the other boy and taking an overlarge bite.

‘ _Oh…’_ It was far from the worst thing he had ever eaten, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant. He’d gotten a good way into the tough core, and the harder bits of fruit were scraping the inside of his mouth, but, aside from the unpleasant texture, Duo had been right: It did taste pretty good.

For his part, the L2 pilot gave him a friendly pat on the arm and a thumbs up. “See? ‘s not so bad, and it’s full of all that fibre. Betcha if everybody ate ‘em like that, we wouldn’t even have a war going on, ‘cause there’d be way fewer people full of shit, right Q?”

He giggled as Duo crunched through the rest of his apple. _‘Leave it to Duo to give a pep talk and weave in a poop joke.’_ Seeing that his friend was finished, Quatre handed the taller boy what remained of his apple.

Lifting it in an appreciative salute, Duo set to work finishing what had to have been his fifth or sixth apple that day. “Thanks, Quat; no point in chucking it out if your tummy’s full. Gotta use everything except the squeal.”

 _‘Apples don’t make noise…’_ At least, _he’d_ never heard any noises when eating fruit. Quatre blinked owlishly at the young man sprawled across his bed, tilting his head to the side in confusion. “I… Duo, I don’t quite know what that means.”

Duo lifted his legs, almost swiping Quatre’s head as he swung them over the bed to sit up. “It’s a thing I heard Father Maxwell say sometimes, times when we had to be thrifty and use up all the parts of something. He explained it to us one time, that it comes from using all the parts of a pig when you cook it. Like at a hog roast.”

Quatre nodded out of habit. “I’ve never been to a hog roast.”

“I got to see one, back on L2, when I was still... still at the church. It only happened the one time, but it was amazing. This rich couple from up the spoke donated a hog to the church – a whole hog3, Quatre! – I'd never even see one before, not in one piece, anyway.” The braided boy had stood up, voice speeding up with excitement. He rocked, almost bouncing, on the balls of his feet, tossing the apple back and forth in his hands. “It could probably have eaten me. And Father sat us down and told us we’d all have to work to share it out: he said that we'd have to use everything but the squeal, 'cause who knew when we'd see another one. Couldn’t risk wasting any of it, right?”

Duo was pacing now, excitedly gesturing, apple still in hand, as he spun in a tight line back and forth across the worn wooden floor. After the third pass, he hopped back up onto the bureau behind him, swinging his feet. “One of the parishioners, this old guy that worked at the loading dock, he cut up a metal fuel crate for us and we got all the old rags and paper scraps we could find - cardboard and shit like that, anything that could burn - and they rigged up this big cooker thing.”  
  
“Like a grill?”  
  
“Yeah, only a really big one. I swear, Q, you coulda grilled my bike on it.” Duo gestured its size with his arms, stretching them wider than the dresser on which he’d once again taken up a perch. He almost overbalanced in the stretch, reaching back with his free hand to grab hold of the chest. “We must've cooked that thing for a coupla days4, well, it felt that way. When it was done, it was all black and oozing. It- it kinda looked like-“

Quatre didn’t need to be an empath to notice how Duo’s voice dropped out, or the way the other boy’s knees were quickly pulled in closer for a one-armed hug.

Before arriving, the braided pilot’s last mission had been with Wufei. Shenlong and Deathscythe worked well in tandem, especially with tasks like the last one: cleaning out another base. The two had split off to regroup with other pilots, with Duo joining him in Wrexham. After such a recent exposure to what a high-powered flamethrower did when aimed at living targets, the blonde had a good idea of why the boy from L2 had silenced himself.

Duo took another bite of the apple, taking his time in chewing it, his gaze far off for a few minutes before he picked back up with his story. “It was just all crusty, you know, but then Sister Helen got this big knife, and she and Father and a coupla folks from the congregation started parcelling it out, and everybody got a share.”

Duo polished off the last bit of the apple with a grim chuckle and a shake of his head. “I really wanted the head, so I could play _Lord of the Flies 5_ with the other kids, but Sister took it over to the old folks’ home, 'cause they hadn't got any money, either, not really. She said the cheek meat was good for old folks. But, you know, we didn't waste a bit of it, even once we’d ate it all.

The taller boy slid a hand up under the back of his sweatshirt, extracting an ivory handled blade from… somewhere. Duo handed the knife, hilt first, to the other pilot with an accomplished smile. "I only got the jaw, but it cleaned up pretty good, right? Made the blade outta old ceramic they'd scrapped in off the exterior. That's thrift right there. Don't waste today what ya won't have tomorrow.”

Quatre couldn’t help feeling a subdued reverence for the knife in his hand. Judging by the slight curve of the grip, it had been made from half of the hog’s jawbone. Duo had grafted the blade into the back of the jaw, where the bone was the heaviest. The sockets where the teeth had been were only just present, filed down, then smoothed from years of use. The bone itself was smooth and warm in his hand, the warm yellow cream a stark contrast to silver-grey heat shielding that made up the blade. Knowing that the other boy had _made_ this, had taken something that other people discarded and turned it into something like this… It was like being handed a priceless work of art.

It was easy to hold, and, he thought, was certain to feel more comfortable close against the skin than the metal one he usually kept clipped to his belt. Somehow, it still _felt_ alive in his hands. Quatre was almost sad to pass it back to the other boy.

Duo slipped the knife back under his shirt – _‘Probably into a custom holster he made, too…’_ – nodding slowly. “There's beautiful things inside the ugly parts and the garbage, but you won't find 'em if you don't get all the way down.”

“Yeah…”

The two sat in companionable silence; Duo watching the foot traffic from his perch by the window, Quatre watching Duo from his spot on the bed. The sounds of the traffic from the window were heavier now, as students and soldiers alike milled back to their quarters. One of their fellow lodgers tripped up the stairs above them.

The braided young man pulled the last apple from his hoodie, turning it over in his hands. It had barely survived its impact with the floor. Bruised on one side, with a split in the side, and what was either dirt or lint ground into a portion of it, Quatre was honestly surprised the other teen had been willing to keep it in his sweatshirt.

“Duo, I’ll… I can get you some more apples tomorrow. You don’t have to eat that one.”

“It’s still good, Quat.” The L2 pilot shook his head, hand raised to silence him. Quatre hadn’t seen him go for his knife, but it was already back in his hand as he cut away the bruised and grimy portions. These he _did_ chuck out of the window, taking careful aim at the few soldiers walking below. Satisfied with his work, and having salvaged most of the fruit, Duo resettled himself on the bed. “You know… one time Sister showed me this trick.”

“Most folks that cut apples cut ‘em down through the middle, but if you cut ‘em like this-” Duo cut laterally across the apple, wiping the knife on his sweatshirt, and held up the half for Quatre to see “- you can find a star. You wouldn’t know it from the outside, but there’s a star in every apple; even the ugly ones. That’s what Sister used to tell us.”

He took hold of Quatre’s wrist, giving his companion the slightly more intact half of apple. Duo cracked a slight smile, before looking wistfully down at his own half. “She said that people were a lot like apples6. Seems kind of hopeful, dun’it? No matter how this shit world gets at you on the outside, no matter how banged up and bloody and fucked over ya get, you’ve got a star in ya.”

Taken aback, Quatre only nodded; he’d never seen Duo get this poignant over… anything. For a long moment, he contemplated his half of the apple, thumb tracing over the star at its centre.

“I think maybe… Maybe she was right, Duo.” The blonde took a small bite, patting his friend’s leg with a misty-eyed smile. “It’s still good.”

“Yeah?”

 Hearing the quaver in his voice, Quatre took a larger bite, chewing as he replied. “Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1 – Apologies to anyone who lives in Wrexam, but Glyndŵr University became an Alliance training facility in this world. On the bright side: Yay, classes were cancelled that term?  
> 2 – Look at how he always has a perfect ironed-in crease in his trousers, even out in the field, and tell me that Quatre is not this prissy. Although, as my lovely beta-reader noted: “On the one hand, possibly! On the other, he does travel with space pirates, haha, he's probably have some idea of roughing it.” Still, I think the Magunacs spoil him just a tad.  
> 3 – I’m working under the assumption that all colonies have livestock. The poorer you are, the less fresh or more processed it is. Also, for anyone that has never been to a hog roast, it really is an event. Where I grew up, we called it a 'pig picking.'  
> 4 – With the assumption that they couldn’t rig up a spit, I’m assuming this was a lot like roasting a hog over coals without turning it, which would be anywhere from 12-26 hours, depending on the hog.  
> 5 – Because Duo is well read and just the cutest little spitfire.  
> 6 – My mom showed me this trick, describing people as apples: All different on the outside, but we all have a star inside.


End file.
